Digital multimedia capabilities can be incorporated into a variety of devices, such as televisions, broadcast systems, computers, tablet devices, smartphones, digital cameras, gaming devices, and teleconferencing devices. Multimedia content providers can implement compression and encoding techniques to communicate the digital multimedia data with the devices. When the digital multimedia data has been encoded, the digital multimedia data may be packetized for transmission or storage. The content provider can packetize digital multimedia data to communicate the digital multimedia data using a variety of schemes, such as transmission over a computer network or via an Internet connection using multimedia streaming.
In one example, the devices can communicate digital multimedia data, such as streaming video, using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) streaming. The HTTP streaming based delivery of the multimedia streaming can include dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). DASH is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique for streaming multimedia content over the Internet. A device using DASH can divide or breakdown the digital multimedia content into a sequence of small HTTP-based segments each containing a portion of the multimedia content. In one example, each segment can contain a short interval of video streaming data for video streaming and playback.
A content provider can use DASH to formats content into segments, fragments, representations, adaptations, and/or elements along with associated metadata such as media presentation description (MPD) files. The content provider can provide the DASH formatted multimedia content to devices via a content server. As the digital multimedia content is streamed to a device (e.g. a DASH client), the DASH client can select from one or more alternative next segments to download and play back based on communication network conditions. For example, the DASH client can select a segment with a highest bit rate available that can be downloaded or streamed for playback without causing stalls or rebuffering events in the playback. As a content provider communicates the DASH-formatted digital multimedia content to device, the content provider needs to verify the device or user of the device receiving the digital multimedia content is authorized to receive the digital multimedia content.
Reference will now be made to the exemplary embodiments illustrated, and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended.